


Familiar Pains

by Skarita



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-05
Updated: 2013-05-05
Packaged: 2017-12-10 10:56:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/785274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skarita/pseuds/Skarita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of drabbles waxing poetic about things that are unfortunately melancholy.</p><p>Be warned, gratuitous Sadstuck lies within.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. She doesn't remember.

She’s not Kanaya. That’s what you think to yourself, when you see the way the light around her catches every vein in her jade-green wings and sets them on fire. She’s not Kanaya. 

When you say her name she turns and doesn't recognize you, and it’s not because she doesn't remember but because you never really met.   
She’s not Kanaya. Her eyes are empty and her lips are black and shaped like disappointment when you say you’re not looking for her- well you are, but not her, another, one that is still-

Alive. 

But your Kanaya isn’t alive either. The dead not-Kanaya doesn't say anything. She smiles sardonically when you tell her you were friends on her suggestion. She calls it surreptitious, and you feel sick inside, like you had imagined the last three years, like everything from the tears and bites and endless bottles of whiskey had never run down your neck in the earlier woeful hours of the morning. She’s not your Kanaya. 

The brand of midnight shared between your lips opens and closes like the blinking her eyes should do but don’t when you sit down next to her and tell her who you are. Or, why you are. It’s both an act of justification and an act of desperation and for a second your heart alights when she tells you that yes, maybe she has seen you before.   
The extinguished lines that harass your features when she tells you it was a you that threaded thorns of darkness through the sky make her pity you in a way that you find entirely unwelcome, and her apologies fall dull against your ears. No, she’s not your Kanaya. 

She doesn't plead and she doesn't frown. She doesn't act bashful when she talks of how she used to idolize you for your rather melodramatic walk-through you wrote two years back and don’t look at anymore. She says what it was, what it is, what you both weren't, and leaves it at that as she waves her seamstress fingers and looks at you with empty eyes.   
She’s pretty, and she’s understanding, and she’s trying to meddle in all the ways you've come to expect but won’t allow from an approximation on the edge of a dreambubble that doesn't know the way you sob into your glass and won’t let her turn off the light when you’re trying to sleep. The fragile Rose, the lonely Rose, the Rose that isn't sure of what she’s doing anymore. She doesn't remember you because before now, you've never met.

When you start to cry, she tries to put her arms around you, and you won’t let her. You can’t stand to let her touch you, the not-Kanaya. She doesn't take offence. She’s been dead a while, she says, and it’s the kind of reaction she expects. This time you apologize. She says it’s alright, but it’s not. 

When the dreambubble blurs, you run back to your Kanaya. When you heave your heavy eyelids open, she’s still there, counting the bottles you've strewn around your bed, the halo of light around her head giving you a comforting confirmation of the absence of wings. 

The way she smiles at you it tinged with familiarity and a sadness you've seen before. And it hurts, but at least it hurts in a familiar way.


	2. In the shadow

There’s something in her eyes, you think.

That’s what draws you in. Something in her eyes.  Something gold flecked and shimmering, something alive, intelligent, knowing. Something certain. You drown in those feelings. The way she captures you isn’t with the words that she’s so fond of, with the logic and the practicality and the promises of something better. It’s her eyes, you think. Her eyes can’t lie to you.

Like a moth drawn to a flame, you can’t stay away from her. In the darkness you tiptoe, watching as when you draw near your own shadow spirals into the giant that you aren’t but wish you were. But you think you could match that shadow, maybe. If she looked at you more.  If she could really see you.

You’re not sure if she can. In as much as your own nature obscures you, your unwillingness to entirely lose yourself to her whims keeps you at arm’s length from lips you so sincerely want to touch, from a voice that matches yours, one that catches you in the places you fall and makes you feel safe.

She’s your mother, you tell yourself. All of this longing is natural. It’s Freud-approved, or some shit.

There’s something about being close to her that makes you feel as though you could finally match the outline of your thousand-foot shadow. A soporific illusion only made wholesome by her smile and the way that she plays at the air with her hands while she talks to you, like she’s just so _alive._

She’s a flame to hold yourself against and feel warm.  You loathe how addicted you’re becoming to her. You put down the bottle and start drinking her elixir. Proximity only serves to make you want her more, and being away from her is like trying to pull against a rubber chain.

Stop it, you tell yourself. She’s a relative, your mother, your sister, and she’s taken.  A separate part of you petulantly replies that human social taboo is hardly relevant on a meteor mostly populated from the offspring of a densely incestuous slurry of home-grown genetics and ectobiological techno fuckery. And she’s taken.

Before you tear yourself away from her you’ll tear yourself apart.

Still you can’t let yourself touch her. You see her with a bottle, one day. It hurts that at the exact time you set yours down and swear to leave it alone she’s reaching halfway to draining it dry. Hangover’s going to be a bitch, you think. Although there’s no hangover if you never stop drinking and to your absolute horror she never does.  You wonder if you were to pick up the gin, she’d put hers down to balance you. _Newton_ , you catch yourself thinking, _and his magnanimous third law can go and choke on dicks forever_ , but you check it down as another approach to try, like its physics, like if you took three gulps of martini she’d sober up by a few milligrams to compensate.

You don’t want to try that, though. Not after everything. So you wait in the shadows and watch, and try to steal some of her light for yourself so that you can feel her warmth, but it always slips away like so much liquid gold between your fingers. Of course, you think, you’re destined to give her away. With this fact you console yourself. Anything that was ever yours is only so until you’re ready to pass it along, mothers and lovers included. At least, according to Calliope, whose elaborations on the nature of rogues and the void only served to validate every one of the moments when you wondered why it was so easy and so hard to give everything you wanted away without so much as a reconciliatory thank you.

You want to curl into a little ball and hate everyone and everything forever, to scream at fate to _fuck right off_ and leave you alone, but you can’t. It’s just not in your nature. Every exploration into the deepest most unholy parts of your psyche eventually resurfaces with the urge to _try again, maybe it’ll be different this time, or at least maybe it won’t suck nearly as hard_. Being a veritable yo-yo of emotions every time you approach her is wearing you down. Kanaya, who seems to have taken over as Rose’s unofficial-official friendmother girlfriend, seems to notice you lurking more often than Rose herself does.  “Are you alright?” she asks, “Did you want something?”

 _Yes_ , you want to reply, _I want a mom that doesn’t giggle and hiccup whenever I try to talk to her. A mom that’s sober enough to take this seriously. A mom that I can look up to, like the one I was supposed to have. The one I thought I had._

But you don’t say any of these things. Instead you give her a watery smile and thank her for taking such good care of Rose. Her reply is usually to guiltily avoid your gaze.  There’s a disappointment in her eyes that she doesn’t want anyone to see.

Rose laughs and waves at you, then stacks another can atop the glorious Tomato-Neon Pyramid of Momlondia.  You wave halfheartedly to her, and a little more enthusiastically to the Mayor. You can’t not love the Mayor. He is literally the best.

You send a wonk his way to let him know he’s doing a great job on the metropolis of can-town, and giving your mother at least something to focus on in the throes of her deepening intoxication. You have a feeling that if she were bored she’d do a lot worse. Kanaya gently pushes a tomato-can into a less precarious position atop the pyramid. When Rose lets out a squeaky laugh and nearly topples over, her hand is there to steady her before you can so much as twitch.

The sudden stroke of envy that drives through you is almost enough to drive you to your knees, and it takes you so totally by surprise that your best defence is to simply jump into the ultraviolet spectrum and excuse yourself from the room.

And for a second, over Kanaya’s outstretched arm, as you force yourself to tear away, you think she actually sees you.

Of course, it would take the act of becoming un-seeable that would cause her to look your way.  

And in that moment you see something in her eyes. 


End file.
